The animator may do drawings 1, 4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, and 20—depending on the delicacy or breadth of the action.
The assistant animator, once called an in-betweener, places two of the animator’s drawings, called “extremes,” over the light board and literally in-betweens them, finding number 2 between 1 and 3, or drawings 5, 6, and 7 between drawings 4 and 8. And so on, for four thousand to five thousand drawings.
Consistency of the characters is assured by use of “model sheets” as well as the director’s character layouts.
As each scene is completed, it is first flipped by the animator and the director, then set for a pencil or line test shot under the animation camera, without backgrounds or color. It is then spliced into a loop and viewed over and over again by the animator, the director, and the assistant, to detect any misplaced drawings, whether the action works correctly, and how it relates to the scenes that precede and follow.
At the conclusion of animation, all these loops are spliced together like a test pencil reel and viewed again for continuity, timing, and animation errors. Only then is it considered ready for ink and paint.
VII. MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS When the animated cartoon is completed to the director’s satisfaction in test (pencil reel) form (that is, without backgrounds, color, dialogue, music, voices, or sound added), then, as the several thousand cels go to be inked and painted, the exposure sheets and the film go to the composer and the sound-effects editor.
CARL STALLING
(Music)
Carl’s beginnings in show business were as an organist in one of the big theaters in Kansas City (the Majestic?). In the silent-film days, a musical score was written to accompany the film when it went into distribution, to be played by the theater organist or, in some cases, a full orchestra.
Sometimes the score failed to arrive, and this is how Carl Stalling came to be the finest and most competent musician in animation. In those instances when the score didn’t arrive, the organist, after perhaps one rehearsal, would have to improvise music to fit the film, which could be anything from The Great Train Robbery to Broken Blossoms to Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms to The Prisoner of Zenda. Carl amassed over those frustrating years perhaps the most comprehensive musical encyclopedia ever to be inculcated into a human brain.
When he accompanied Walt Disney west, he provided the score for all the early Disney talking films: Steamboat Willie, Flowers and Trees, The Skeleton Dance, etc. By great good luck, we at Warners inherited him in the middle 1930s, and what a jewel he was. And what a wizard. He could and often did write the score for an animated cartoon in five days, to be followed by Milt Franklin’s brilliant arrangements. They were both equally familiar with contemporary and classical music. Carl was a joy, another section of the creative glue that made our little card house stable.
TREG BROWN
(Sound Effects)
Treg had been a coal miner, a college student (unusual in those days), guitarist and vocalist for Red Nichols and His Five Pennies, hobo and tramp,* songwriter, graduate chiropractor, Rosicrucian, linguist,† Academy Award winner,‡ and finally a resident Catholic in Spain. We once asked him, if he had it to do over again, would he do it the same way. After a moment’s thought he replied, “I don’t think so, I wouldn’t have the time.”
But as sound-effects editor is where he shined. He could contrive more sound effects with an inflated balloon (earthquakes, wrestling grunts and groans, branches breaking, bullfrogs croaking, etc., etc.) than most editors could with all the sound devices at their command. With a newspaper, Treg could create any kind of fire from bon- to forest to rocket.
Moral: Don’t use glue on a dynamite stick
But it was as a master of incongruity in the Road Runner and Coyote and other films that he was at his resonant best. He realized that if the eye saw one thing and the ear heard another, subconsciously aroused laughter could result. As an example, but a good one, in one sequence when the Coyote got his foot caught in the line attached to a harpoon and was dragged willy-nilly across the desert floor over cacti, under boulders, bumping and slapping every obstacle possible, never once did Treg supply a logical sound effect: flying springs, breaking bottles, small explosives, human ouch’es and oof’s, popping balloons, railroad crossing bells, and so on.
He was a jewel, was Treg. He added laughter where mild ha-ha’s might have served. He served us well indeed, and he closed the ranks as the final creative good soldier that made our studio complete.
Like some embryos and all babies, animated characters can be a burden and an irritation to those who bear them. As in the case of Bugs Bunny, the gestation period may drag on for two or three years before you can even be sure you have a baby, much less see it grow up. A time period that may be pleasant and to be expected in a lady elephant is a source of frustration to an animator.
In Bugs’s case, there appeared in a few early cartoons a sort of unfertilized half-cel of creativity, wandering wanly around our films, searching for its better—or bitter—half. A crude creature, half—or perhaps only a quarter—completed, but within it was a tiny spark of creativity.
For me this spark surfaced—although I did not recognize it at the time—in a cartoon film I directed in 1938 called Prest-o Change-o, released in March of 1939. In their fine source book The Warner Brothers Cartoons,* Will Friedwald and Jerry Beck gave this outline of that cartoon:
“Two curious puppies come in from the storm into an old dark house. They soon encounter a bizarrely magical white rabbit, who comes out of a magic hat to lead them on a merry chase, constantly doing tricks
